Maya Visual Effects The Innovator's Guide: Autodesk Official Press

By Eric Keller

Create innovative CG solutions with Maya and this creative guide

Professional Maya artists have to think on their feet. It's nothing for them to receive just vague sketches or incomplete ideas of what the studio wants and have to come up with something brilliant. If you're an intermediate to advanced Maya user, Maya Visual Effects: The Innovator's Guide, Second Edition is what you need to meet the challenge. Professional Maya artist Eric Keller offers inspired solutions and hands-on projects, as well as numerous practical shortcuts and deadlines, so you learn to produce innovative CG assets from scratch, using Maya, on a deadline.

• Shows intermediate to advanced Maya users new solutions, workarounds, and shortcuts for creating Maya visual effects on deadline
• Gives readers plenty of hands-on projects, so they come up with solutions that they can add to their Maya toolsets
• Offers workable ideas that can be applied, no matter which version of Maya software is being used
• Presents projects in an engaging style, with pages of full-color imagery to illustrate concepts

Create amazing effects with the creative insights and fresh advice in this new edition of Maya Visual Effects: The Innovator's Guide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118654880

Book preview

Introduction

Be creative is the one instruction I find in many CG books that always makes me laugh out loud. Why is the author telling me to be creative? If I wasn’t a creative person, I wouldn’t be interested in computer graphics in the first place.

It always seems to me that authors of tutorials use the phrase be creative when they are not exactly sure what to say. But upon reflection, it’s not really a bad piece of advice if you stop to think about what drives the creative process. Creativity is the ability to make connections between two or more seemingly unrelated things. For example, when chemicals were exposed to light in a particular way, the art of photography was born. Sound vibrations used to carve grooves into a wax tube gave birth to recorded music. The aha! moment occurs when an artist suddenly realizes that what makes art more than the sum of its parts is the way in which those parts are connected. When successful, this realization is shared by the audience in the form of an experience that feels new and reveals something about the universe that may not have been immediately apparent before. It sounds like lofty stuff, but this is the whole point of creativity; it is an exploration of what new things can be made with the existing tools we have before us. Innovation is the word used to describe the process of making these types of connections. Innovation is the engine of creativity.

Autodesk® Maya® is all about connections. It’s a virtual world made of nodes . . . individual packets of data. A Maya scene is just a bunch of nodes connected together. This is clearly illustrated in any number of Maya interface panels such as the Node Editor, Hypergraph, Outliner, Hypershade, and many others. When you first learn Maya, you generally go through the tutorials that are meant to show you how to connect these nodes in their intended arrangements in order to create the types of animations you commonly see. Most tutorials will take you through the process of how to use joints to make a character walk, how to create snow using particles, or how to make a ball bounce using the Graph Editor. These are all important, even crucial, skills to learn. Unfortunately, most tutorials stop there, leaving you to wonder what’s next. There is a gap in Maya training between the beginner tutorials and the advanced tutorials. This book is meant to bridge that gap. I wanted to create a series of fun tutorials specifically for the student who has completed the basic training but is not yet ready for the advanced techniques. The goal of this book is to help you understand that the true power of Maya lies in its ability to make connections in interesting ways; in other words, how to be creative in Maya.

The techniques in this book are just ideas meant to inspire you. They are culled from my own experience working as a professional in the industry. The audience is expecting to be surprised, your art director is looking for something that hasn’t been done, and the client wants to set themselves apart from their competition. In these situations, simply being a master of tried-and-true techniques is not going to keep you employed. These situations call for innovation and creativity. You need to think on your feet and be fearless about taking risks. How you solve problems, how you connect the various nodes within Maya, is what is going to set you apart from the CG artists who are content to simply repeat the same techniques everyone else has been using for the past 20 years.

My hope is that by going through these tutorials you’ll acquire a deeper understanding of how Maya works and this will help you to develop your own Maya innovations when confronted with a challenge on a job or with one of your own projects. I sincerely doubt that I should see one of my techniques used verbatim in a movie or a commercial. That’s really not the point of this book. The point of this book is to help you discover ways in which you can use Maya to be creative.

Who Should Buy This Book

This is not a beginner Maya book, nor is it a comprehensive guide to every tool in Maya. If you are new to Maya, I recommend you first familiarize yourself with the basics, the interface, and the tools. I recommend a book such as Introducing Autodesk Maya 2014 by Dariush Derakhshani (Sybex, 2013) as well as the Maya documentation. The Innovator's Guide is comprised of 24 tutorials loosely categorized by Maya features. It is meant for students who are looking to take their Maya skills to the next level. It’s also for the professional who is looking to deepen their skills perhaps in an area of Maya they are not familiar with. I’ve had some wonderful feedback on the first edition of this book, which was written in 2006. Many professionals have told me that the tutorials were a great source of inspiration when they were stumped by a tricky problem that lacked an obvious solution. Bottom line, if you have not used Maya before or if you’re an expert in another piece of CG software such as 3ds Max, buy this book, but then set it aside; spend some time learning Maya and then pick this book up when you’re ready to improve your skills.

This book was written using a prerelease version of Maya 2014, but many of the techniques can be used in older versions of Maya, at least as far back as version 2011. There are a few exceptions, including the Maya Hair tutorials, which use features introduced in Maya 2013, but with some thought and creativity even these techniques can be applied to older versions of Maya. So, if you don’t have the very latest version, not to worry, you should still be able to get a lot out of this book.

What’s Inside

The lessons in this book are loosely grouped by Maya tools, but that’s not to say you won’t find nParticle techniques demonstrated in the chapter on textures or nCloth techniques in the chapter on nParticles. Each chapter consists of three tutorials demonstrating some neat ideas of how the Maya tools can be connected in interesting ways to achieve a particular effect. Each tutorial presents a problem you might encounter as a Maya artist working in a small studio. These scenarios are based on my experience working as a freelance artist in Hollywood. I tried to make the tutorials fun and engaging as well as short. At the end of each tutorial is a short section called Further Study that has suggestions of how you can build on the techniques you’ve just learned.

Many of the tutorials are accompanied by a mini-lesson on Maya Embedded Language (MEL) scripting. MEL is a scripting language used to automate repetitive tasks in Maya as well as add additional functionality. My good friend Max Dayan, himself an accomplished professional Maya artist and an instructor at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, has written these scripts along with a short description of the logic he used to write them.

These scripts are learning scripts; in other words, they were created to help you understand the techniques of the lessons as well as how to write better scripts. In a professional setting, Max’s scripts would be more efficient but more difficult for a student to understand, so in some cases he has sacrificed a small amount of efficiency to maximize clarity. If you are not interested or you’re intimidated by MEL scripting (and many artists including myself are not necessarily master programmers), you can feel free to skip these sections and return to them later when you feel like you want to dive in to the world of MEL scripting.

If you’ve never written an MEL script before, you should spend a little time familiarizing yourself with Maya’s Script Editor. I recommend reading through the Scripting section of the Maya documentation so that you understand how scripts are entered into the Script Editor or written in an external text editor, what it means to source a script, and how to create a shelf button from a script.

The tutorials in each section have accompanying scene files that you can use to follow along. There is no DVD with this book; instead, we have decided it’s more efficient to provide a link to the Sybex website where the project files can be downloaded. Each chapter of this book has its own project file that contains everything you need to follow along. To retrieve the file, simply use your web browser to go to this address:www.sybex.com/go/mayavisualeffects2e. Here, you’ll find the projects in zipped archives as well as instructions on how to use them. As you start each chapter, make sure you use the File menu to set the current Maya project to the appropriate chapter project. This way, textures, caches, and other externally linked files will behave predictably.

The chapters do not need to be read in order; each lesson is self-contained, so feel free to skip around between the chapters and their tutorials as you like. The difficulty of each tutorial ranges from easy to intermediate with a few extra advanced challenges thrown in for fun. Here’s a description of what you’ll find in each chapter:

Chapter 1: Texture Effects This chapter contains three tutorials designed to approach texturing with some interesting twists. Learn to create an interactive animation control for lighting up a demonic neon sign using a ramp texture, create holographic effects using the ambient occlusion texture node, and create scrolling text for a blimp sign.

Chapter 2: Particle Effects One of the most powerful animation tools in Maya is the humble particle. These tutorials give you a small taste of the kinds of things you can do with some clever tricks. You’ll create a dynamically blossoming cherry tree, grow a beard of bees for a character, and create an animation control panel that can choreograph a school of swimming fish.

Chapter 3: Joint Rigging for Effects Joints can be used for a lot more than character animation. This chapter has three challenges designed to inspire you with ideas for how you can exploit the power of Maya’s skeleton tools. Joints are used to create a creepy undulating mass of tentacles, unroll a magic brick path through a forest, and create a growing mass of bacteria by combining joints and particles.

Chapter 4: Creative Blend Shape Techniques Blend shape deformers are easy to set up and animate. Because of this, they can easily be combined with deformers to create some unique effects. In this chapter, you’ll create an interactive rig that can be used to coax abstract designs and motion from a field of bocks, you’ll build a small population of swimming plankton by layering simple deformers, and finally you’ll learn how to write an MEL script that automates the setup of complex blend shape sequences.

Chapter 5: Paint Effects Paint Effects is Maya’s own procedural modeling tool commonly used for creating plantlife. In this chapter, you’ll learn some cool tricks for using Paint Effects as a solution to some interesting problems. You’ll learn how to instance animated lightning bolts to particles, animate an eye suffering from an alien infection, and use Paint Effects as a way to deform geometry.

Chapter 6: nCloth Techniques Maya’s nCloth is an easy-to-use system for creating soft body-style dynamic effects. Beyond its obvious application for adding dynamic motion to a character’s cloth, it also has a myriad possibilities as a solution for problems posed by unconventional animation. In this chapter, you’ll use nCloth as a way to melt the metal of a complex gun model, you’ll create an animated spider web by combining nCloth and Paint Effects, and you’ll animate a drop of water rolling off a blade of grass.

Chapter 7: Fluid Effects Maya’s Fluid Effects can be intimidating to a new user, but they’re actually quite easy to use and, when combined with other dynamics, very powerful effects tools. In this chapter, you’ll use 2D fluid containers to create a 3D shock wave, propel a rocket with nParticles and fluids, and construct the head of an android from floating gooey blobs.

Chapter 8: nHair and Fur Effects Maya’s nHair system and its fur tools aren’t just for characters and creatures; they can also be used as animation tools. In this chapter, you’ll build an undulating jellyfish by lofting geometry from dynamic hair curves, create a rig for Medusa’s head of snakes, and animate an alien design in a crop field.

How to Contact the Author

I enjoy hearing from the readers of my books. Feedback helps me continually improve my skills as an author. You can contact me through my website, www.bloopatone.com, as well as see examples of my own artwork there.

Sybex strives to keep you supplied with the latest tools and information you need for your work. Please check the book’s website at www.sybex.com/go/mayavisualeffects2e, where Sybex will post additional content and updates that supplement this book should the need